DFE 1 Notes (Laura)
Spelling is pretty much just as I heard it, LOL. Nick was taking notes in Stormreach, so I primarily took notes on my own parts. CC'ing Nick in case my recollections are useful for his notes. 1) The Vikings Deukalion had arrived with were being arrested on the orders of the Harbormaster's son, Jonas Wilks, and their goods confiscated. The Riedran ambassador arrived. Apparently Deukalion had helped the Vikings raid the Riedrans and steal like a million GP worth of stuff from them, including a piece of special equipment the Riedrans were and desperate to get back. Some sahaugins surfaced and drove the furious ambassador back. Deukalion complained to the authorities, who released the Vikings and returned their loot. (The attacking and stealing had happened somewhere else and wasn't Stormreach's problem.) The Viking captain was named Jarl Halvarson. 2) Meanwhile Loic got a note asking him to report to the docks to deliver an important package. It was a large box. He peeked inside it and saw lots of gears. He delivered it as requested, then found out a woman he knew had been kidnapped to threaten him with had he refused to deliver it. Later the secret service arrested him for stealing the box, but after he was able to provide witnesses at the dock to back up his version of events was released again. 4) Ademar, Merkha and Kakra were in the Unicorn Inn where they saw a group of Ghost Centaurs from the Xen'drik jungle. They had bleached hair, fur and skin and are rumored to be able to become incorporeal and run at full speed through the trees. Later, we saw them complain to the Mayor, who is also Protectress of the Xen'drik, that the Falcons of the Spires--anghella--were preying upon their people in the jungle. 5) Wakinyan and Jaicinteleq ran into each other on their way to Ardeth's house. Wakinyan wanted to perform a healing ritual on the garden that he had gotten from Grandmother Moon, and Jaicinteleq wanted to speak with Ardeth. First, they saw a vision in the nearby seer circle of a white temple shattering in the jungle and the mountain beginning to move. The seer and the other people watching were shocked because this was not the vision the circle usually showed. Then the two knocked on Ardeth's door and talked with her for a while. Wakinyan brought her a message from Shangri-La which she was touched by, then told her he wanted to do the healing ritual, and Ardeth said it was a problem because there are three moons on Aesira and today was an impossible day to do it anyway. She invited him to a ritual that afternoon to see why. Jaicinteleq returned Ardeth's amulet to her and told her that Jaycinthe had held no power here when Ardeth was young and couldn't do anything to help her, but that she wouldn't allow such things to happen again and wanted to make a public apology/forgiveness ceremony. Ardeth was moved and shaken by this and agreed to the ceremony. A man came into the room and greeted Ardeth familiarly, who Jaicinteleq correctly surmised was Morinatar. Jaicinteleq and Wakinyan returned to Jaycinthe and discussed the situation with her. Jaycinthe said she would try and find a way to adapt Wakinyan's ritual to Aesira's moons. At the ritual that afternoon, Ardeth called back all the people she had used her healing powers to help over the past month and asked them to pray to give her power. Morinatar and Adoniel were also there. Ardeth summoned the Shibboleth back and collected a drop of blood from each of the people in attendance. When Wakinyan returned the next day, he found that the garden had now been healed, presumably by Ardeth's ritual. Ardeth gave him a vial of cleansed earth in thanks for his concern. Ardeth, Morinatar, and Adoniel all came to the ceremony in Lorsmarch that evening. The ceremony was all in Chla Nachran, which the PCs other than Jaicinteleq don't speak, but she explained to Wakinyan that it was a ceremony of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Jaycinthe and Ardeth embraced at the end of it. Jaicinteleq was also investigating a situation with six young men and women who had recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Stormreach. Having already spoken with the families and friends of the other five missing youths, she visited the house of the last one and managed to speak with his mother despite the attempts of his sister, Ilia, to block her from doing so. The young man's mother confirmed Jaicinteleq's hypothesis that the six missing people all knew each other: they were a group of close friends and former schoolmates. Ilia blurted out that they "weren't angels," which in this gameworld is probably actually a good thing, but Jaicinder went back to visit her later and get her side of the story. After setting her up on a date with his friend Anghien, he learned from her that the six friends, who Ilia called the "Gang of Six," had been troublemakers in school who had frequently picked on other kids. Jaicinder asked whether there was anyone in particular they might have bullied who could have held a grudge, and she said no, they picked on different people each time and eventually grew out of it, and as far as she knew they didn't have any ongoing enemies. Jaicinteleq reported this to Jaycinthe as well. 6) Meanwhile Leonus D'Cannith was trying to put together an expedition into the Xen'drik and arrange a date with a lady named Dana. The first went better than the last. He found Loic and sent him to fetch some rangers from his guild; he found Ademar and met Merkha and Kakra, and he found Wakinyan. Deukalion, who was nearby, introduced himself as a specialist in brown water boating, which Leonus was looking for, and asked to join as well. Leonus asked everyone to meet him the next morning at the Institute. Unfortunately, he was delayed by his disastrous date, in which six men jumped him, caught him in a net, beat the crap out of him, tore his clothes up, and threatened to kill him if he didn't stay away from Dana. He arrived to the meeting battered, bloody and disheveled, reported the crime in deadpan fashion, and then proceeded to run the meeting anyway as if nothing was wrong. Everyone else promptly voted him the party leader. 7) Then there were some presentations on the ecology of the Xen'drik by four members of the Institute, a sage master named Voishnya, a biologer named Goodman, a ranger named Zaron, and a military commander named Unjag Denieth. There was a lot of information here that Nick was primarily taking notes on; my character wasn't present, but I assume I got updated later. The main things I noted were the different biomes of the Xendrik (the single-canopy, triple-canopy, and 5-canopy jungles and the volcanic biome), the necessity of having three people on watch at all times, and the presence of the Traveller's Curse which interferes with travel times and causes the supernatural ways of affecting the world to behave strangely. Also, the Institute apparently has no plant samples from the Xen'drik at ALL, so they want anything and everything the party can bring back. The primary mission is to gather information about the Xen'drik. The first run, called the "milk run" is simply traveling to the settlement of Eberron's Rest and back. Additional named NPCs joining the party included the geologer Anne Smith, the biologer Gwen, and three rangers named Galdon, Thomas, and Erin. 8) At the end of the presentations, Detective Sergeant Zurran of the French orc guard arrived with Jaicinteleq and Jaicinder, saying that the three of us were joining the mission as we had a criminal to apprehend in Eberron's Rest. 9) The group headed into the Xendrik at 5AM on December 2nd. At the end of December 3rd, we arrived at the jungle itself. Jaicinteleq determined that Friendly Forest has a variable and unpredictable range in the Xen'drik. We sighted a spider of tremendous size preying on unseen creatures in the canopy overhead, and a large winged creature passing at a distance. On Dec 5th we were charged by a huge crocodilian, which was repulsed by Merkha's invocation to Sobek and returned to the jungle. 10) On Dec 6th we encountered some ruins of a strange black brick with one red pillar, all overgrown with vines and with no discernible tracks in the area. The pillar was inscribed "Aeshiba Zeus" in Greek on the top, and had carvings in Chla Nachran on the bottom that Jaicinteleq identified as an ancient form of the language and representing some kind of ritual in an overgrown area in the center of the ruins, which she thought might be dangerous. Anne Smith noticed that the Greek writing was added more recently than the Chla Nachran writing, and took a sample of the brick back to the wagon to study. Wakinyan used his unseen servant to clear the jungle plants away from the overgrown area, which proved to be some kind of well. The unseen servant was sucked into it and disappeared. Wakinyan went after it and was also sucked in; Loic grabbed Wakinyan to pull him out and was instead sucked in after him. Wakinyan successfully cast a Web underneath them to stop them from falling further, and after Jaicinteleq fiddled around with the pillar for a while, the sucking winds died down and they were able to climb out. Anne Smith returned and declared that the bricks were steeped in blood. Leonus made the decision the party should leave this place. Kakra later identified "Aeshiba" as the name of an island discovered by an early Greek expedition. 11) On Dec 7th we arrived at Eberron's Rest, to find the settlement in flames and disarray. Canoes carrying natives in large masks pulled away as we approached. We found the gate breached and a large slaughter inside. (The natives had apparently removed their own dead when they retreated--the survivors inside the fort estimated more than 100 of the natives had been killed in the attack, mostly by a group of 10 arrivee Israeli soldiers with firearms.) A) The Israelis were all dead except for one woman who Wakinyan knew, named Rachel, who was nailed to the wall but still alive. Wakinyan performed a shamanic ritual to heal her and safely remove the spikes from her body. B) The people who had retreated into the tavern were all right; they had started the fire outside the tavern themselves to keep the attackers away from it. C) The attackers were not able to get into the round tower, which is a Rat Onna Stick restaurant run by Mac the motorcycle man and had 38 local tribeswomen inside shooting arrows at the attackers. D) Almost everyone else was slaughtered. There was one girl who had escaped into an attic, and the criminal who Zurran and Jaicinteleq were pursuing, Shadon, had escaped over the back wall. They tracked and caught him nearby and returned to the settlement, where Zurran questioned him. And that was where we left off for the day. Onward!